*ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please.

[th'engineer]

Originally Posted by Neil

Same applies to you too!

I know thats why i agree with rone

[th'engineer]

Originally Posted by Hans Gruber

People realise that we're going to have to change ISPs. It's just a lot of hassle (and expense) getting sky and dsl installed, which I'm sure I speak for a lot of people when I say we could do without.

I have to say that Neil had no problems with switching, as with all things NTL we will have to see what happens.

Seems a bit daft upgrading everyones speed then capping them but thats the NTL we know and love.

I wish someone could explain the logic of NTL why not keep the original speed uncapped but have a better upload speed.

[ian@huth]

Originally Posted by th'engineer

I have to say that Neil had no problems with switching, as with all things NTL we will have to see what happens.

Seems a bit daft upgrading everyones speed then capping them but thats the NTL we know and love.

I wish someone could explain the logic of NTL why not keep the original speed uncapped but have a better upload speed.

Have you ever thought that some people want to get a job done quicker and are not interested in doing more jobs. How many times do you click on a link in a post and then have to wait two or three minutes for whatever to download. It's much nicer to have twice the speed and only have to wait one minute or so to see the result.

I think that what NTL is doing is very logical and that the vast majority of customers will welcome the extra speed and see the benefit of having it whilst going nowhere near the caps.

[Rone]

"Have you ever thought that some people want to get a job done quicker and are not interested in doing more jobs. How many times do you click on a link in a post and then have to wait two or three minutes for whatever to download. It's much nicer to have twice the speed and only have to wait one minute or so to see the result."

If all you want to do is browse thats fantastic.
The internet should be more than that imo, first it was music companies letting you pay to download, soon it could be d\load your own dvds, then theres movie clips, software updates, streaming video, the list is endless, and then just as it all becomes within everyones reach at good speed, at a not unreasonable price, it comes to a point where i have to watch what i'm doing.
No offence ianathuth, you often make really good points, just that ntl's vision for the future seems a bit blind.

As for the comment its a load of aggro swapping packages, its now dead easy, BT are getting my old number transferred and inform ntl my phone package is being cancelled, Sky are on the way, boy are they eager, and Nildrams only clause is its a 1 month contract, now thats pretty fair.
They can activate the adsl within 10 days of getting a BT line.
Sorry to go off the cap bit, but theres lots of points need clearing up.

[Chrysalis]

Bill C I see you have resorted to personal remarks against me as you know I have made valid points.

Contrary to what people might thing a bigger network results on LOWER costs as the cost per user is lower.

1 - Buying bandwidth in larger amounts = more purchasing power so less price paid per mbit.
2 - Having bigger pipes results in less visible contention, eg. try doing 20:1 contention on a 2mbit pipe for 512kbit users, you would be lucky to get 8 on there without seeing issues and thats only 2:1 contention so when you have smaller pipes you are forced to lower contention to maintain qos this means higher cost per user.
3 - Ntl use transperent proxies again reducing costs, most of the isp's I mentioned if not all dont do this so their costs will be higher.

So in short if ntl do all this and they have to cap to make a profit then something is f**ked up somewhere, they are either making a obscene profit for their shareholders (i think some of you posting here own shares ) or their directors need replacing because they should be making a large profit with all the above practices.

I keep saying it again and again, although ntl dont compete with telewest it doesnt mean we cant ask questions why telewest are able to provide so much more then ntl and expect a good answer instead of abusive remarks made against those who dont like it.

The isp's I mentioned do I know if they have issues?, well I read adslguide regurly following the latest adsl news and I know which isp's have problems and which dont, and the ones I mentioned do not have problems related to contention and speed, nildram is the best example of this their customers consist of lots of online gamers and their pings will be very sensitive to contention so I am sure I would know about it if there was any issues there.

Finally why wasnt any of the following idea implemented.

Time of day cap - have cap for peak time usage and then make it unmetered for say 1am to 8am.

Unmetered package - unmetered 24/7 but speeds reduced to 150kbit at peak time.

Sell static ip's and other extras - It is proven on many adsl isp's that people want these things and they can have a high profit margin for isp's and as such subsidise other parts of the operation.

Reintroduce install fee - This free install has gone on for year's now when is it going to come back.

Introduce support tiering - For those who are newbies and will need tech support add £5 to monthly fee and provide 0800 (150) support, the experienced ones of us use premium rate support.

In short there are many sides of the argument, some of you may say you subisidise my bandwidth usage, whilst I could argue I subsidise you having to ring up tech support every day when you get confused as to why your drivers broken etc..

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Bill C I see you have resorted to personal remarks against me as you know I have made valid points.

Please quote the PERSONAL remark i made towards you. ?

But dont worry you will not get another so called PERSONAL remark from me.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Contrary to what people might thing a bigger network results on LOWER costs as the cost per user is lower.

1 - Buying bandwidth in larger amounts = more purchasing power so less price paid per mbit.

According to certain forum members, who would be in a position to know, the problem for NTL (and Telewest actually) is that they buy hardware in a niche market. A market small enough that economies of scale do not apply. As I understand it (and as I explained earlier) the bandwidth on NTL's backbone is fine. The problem comes at the UBRs, which may or may not be able to support the bandwidth required. Before you mention buying power again, bear in mind that (I believe) the only company that make UBRs & parts that NTL can use is Cisco. Cisco is far larger than NTL. Also, if Cisco is the only company that makes the upgrades needed, what are NTL going to say? "Reduce your prices or we won't upgrade"?.

2 - Having bigger pipes results in less visible contention, eg. try doing 20:1 contention on a 2mbit pipe for 512kbit users, you would be lucky to get 8 on there without seeing issues and thats only 2:1 contention so when you have smaller pipes you are forced to lower contention to maintain qos this means higher cost per user.

Are we using the same definition of contention here? As far as I know, contention is the ratio of users' max bandwidth requirement vs the amount of bandwidth available. Basically if NTL had a 2Mbit pipe and put 20 1Mbit users on there, the contentention would be 10:1. It is true, however, that to add more users and keep contention down, they may need to add bandwidth.

So in short if ntl do all this and they have to cap to make a profit then something is f**ked up somewhere, they are either making a obscene profit for their shareholders (i think some of you posting here own shares ) or their directors need replacing because they should be making a large profit with all the above practices.

Not sure they are making a large profit, but assuming they are, maybe they NEED to do this to keep the banks and venture capitalists who rescued the company a couple of years back happy? I have worked for a company financed by venture capitalists. If the VCs say you make a profit, you have to make a profit. If you don't, they pull their money out and you possibly fold.

The biggest mistake NTL made was taking out loans and buying loads of smaller cable companies then sitting back and watching while the whole comms market collapsed, but that's a topic for elsewhere.

I keep saying it again and again, although ntl dont compete with telewest it doesnt mean we cant ask questions why telewest are able to provide so much more then ntl and expect a good answer instead of abusive remarks made against those who dont like it.

True. I didn't think anyone was getting abusive though.

[ian@huth]

Chrysalis, Regarding point 2 that you have made in your post #125.

NTL may have a bigger network and big fat pipes all over the place but before you get to those big fat pipes you have to go through a UBR which has hundreds of customers using it and a relatively small amount of bandwidth available. The available bandwidth depends on the channel width, modulation type and modulation level in question. I am sure that one of the NTL peeps such as Ignition can tell you what bandwidth is available through a UBR card. You will see that it doesn't take many users maxing out their connections to bring all users on that card down to dial-up speeds.

[Ignition]

Blimey I wander off for a while and it all goes pearshaped.

Th'Eng, nice glib remark, I'm aware we're in the UK, a poster mentioned an unmetered 4/1 ISP in the US and I asked which one it was. Turned out he was referring to Bell / Sympatico in Canada, which I was already aware of (moving out there soon I need to know these things )

Now then...

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Contrary to what people might thing a bigger network results on LOWER costs as the cost per user is lower.

Doesn't do much for costs on local HFC network though.

1 - Buying bandwidth in larger amounts = more purchasing power so less price paid per mbit.

Doesn't do anything for the major cost, HFC upgrade, maintenance, resegmentation, etc.

2 - Having bigger pipes results in less visible contention, eg. try doing 20:1 contention on a 2mbit pipe for 512kbit users, you would be lucky to get 8 on there without seeing issues and thats only 2:1 contention so when you have smaller pipes you are forced to lower contention to maintain qos this means higher cost per user.

Statistical contention yes. Shame that on an HFC network one needs to either improve the quality of the HFC or split nodes in order to increase bandwidth.

3 - Ntl use transperent proxies again reducing costs, most of the isp's I mentioned if not all dont do this so their costs will be higher.

No idea what those beasties do for the bottom line, personally I'd get shot of them or use them for caching more bandwidth hungry traffic.

So in short if ntl do all this and they have to cap to make a profit then something is f**ked up somewhere, they are either making a obscene profit for their shareholders (i think some of you posting here own shares ) or their directors need replacing because they should be making a large profit with all the above practices.

Actually no, Telewest are much more profitable operating wise.

I keep saying it again and again, although ntl dont compete with telewest it doesnt mean we cant ask questions why telewest are able to provide so much more then ntl and expect a good answer instead of abusive remarks made against those who dont like it.

Oki doki. A while ago there was this cable company, the biggest in the UK in terms of homes passed, called Consumer Co. Owned by Cable and Wireless. At this time Telewest were number 2 and ntl were number 3. Consumer Co. was put up for sale and both ntl and Telewest bid obscene amounts but ntl won as more of their bid was cash and less shares compared to TW. Due to the slower than expected take up of CATV (Sky took a much higher share of market than satellite in North America and more homes use CATV for standard analogue channels there rather than terrestrial antennae and aerials) essentially both cable companies crashed and burned. ntl were running on fumes for a while and were restructuring debt a full year before Telewest did. While ntl were restructuring Telewest were doing extensive resegmentation and upgrades on their (smaller and with no Ex-Videotron, Bell Cablemedia instead IIRC) hybrid networks.

In a sentence it comes down to cash. Had Telewest won the bidding for CoCo positions would probably be reversed.

The isp's I mentioned do I know if they have issues?, well I read adslguide regurly following the latest adsl news and I know which isp's have problems and which dont, and the ones I mentioned do not have problems related to contention and speed, nildram is the best example of this their customers consist of lots of online gamers and their pings will be very sensitive to contention so I am sure I would know about it if there was any issues there.

Heh cba to read back + find said list. Nildram certainly aren't without issues though, Datastream customers complaining of poor pings / speeds, they traffic shaped at one point after running out of bandwidth amongst other things.

Time of day cap - have cap for peak time usage and then make it unmetered for say 1am to 8am.

Most consistent traffic is upstream, which doesn't drop much between those times. If it's getting caned overnight as people don't have to worry about limitation late night gamers, maybe playing clan matches in the USA, will moan like hell.

Unmetered package - unmetered 24/7 but speeds reduced to 150kbit at peak time.

Ummm. Because it's peak time, when people generally want to use their connections. People don't pay enough to be able to download @ 3Mbit for 18 hours a day all month either.

Sell static ip's and other extras - It is proven on many adsl isp's that people want these things and they can have a high profit margin for isp's and as such subsidise other parts of the operation.

Because cable IPs delivered via standard means cannot be static. Without a static IP there goes the extras like IP blocks, custom reverse DNS, etc. Can I point out to you that ntl is the biggest retail ISP. Do BTBroadband or Wanadoo offer these extras? ntl as a company cannot be everything to everyone and have to tend to the majority like every other huge ISP. Most people don't give a monkey's about a static IP or rDNS, that's where ISPs like Zen, Nildram, A+A etc have their niche offering these services.

Reintroduce install fee - This free install has gone on for year's now when is it going to come back.

Is that any of your business? Presumably if you change back to BT you'll complain that part of your line rental is subsidising someone in the Outer Hebrides whose phone line costs several hundred a month to operate.

Introduce support tiering - For those who are newbies and will need tech support add £5 to monthly fee and provide 0800 (150) support, the experienced ones of us use premium rate support.

Because 95% or more of customers *are* newbies and nearly all customers will have to call support at some point. Less 'newbies' will sign up due to the extra fiver a month on the headline price, less 'experienced' ones of you will sign up due to the premium rate support, or will be peeved when you have to ring.

In short there are many sides of the argument, some of you may say you subisidise my bandwidth usage, whilst I could argue I subsidise you having to ring up tech support every day when you get confused as to why your drivers broken etc..

In EVERY company without exception some customers subsidise others. I will happily argue that those using extreme amounts of bandwidth are being heavily subsidised by others, yes even those 'newbies' who ring tech support from time to time (also known as pretty much everyone). I rang tech support 3 times while working for ntl several levels above them because I needed and engineer and they are the people who sort it, presumably that makes me a newbie?

Try and engage brain before fingers, most of your arguments are fatally flawed and take no consideration of any viewpoint other than you own, which is highly polarised and not very well informed of either the business or technical side of cable and telecomms.

[quadplay]

Originally Posted by scastle

Before you mention buying power again, bear in mind that (I believe) the only company that make UBRs & parts that NTL can use is Cisco. Cisco is far larger than NTL. Also, if Cisco is the only company that makes the upgrades needed, what are NTL going to say? "Reduce your prices or we won't upgrade"?.

Not quite - other companies do make UBRs (which are actually called CMTS - Cable Modem Termination Servers - uBR (Universal Broadband Router) is the Cisco term). In fact, ntl trialed a Juniper CMTS, but they didn't perform very well.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by jimbo

Not quite - other companies do make UBRs (which are actually called CMTS - Cable Modem Termination Servers - uBR (Universal Broadband Router) is the Cisco term). In fact, ntl trialed a Juniper CMTS, but they didn't perform very well.

They did actually there were other reasons why it was never deployed

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by jimbo

Not quite - other companies do make UBRs (which are actually called CMTS - Cable Modem Termination Servers - uBR (Universal Broadband Router) is the Cisco term). In fact, ntl trialed a Juniper CMTS, but they didn't perform very well.

Fair enough... I was trying to make the point that it's a limited market though. Not many people or companies need Cable Modem Termination Servers.

[quadplay]

Originally Posted by Ignition

They did actually there were other reasons why it was never deployed

I was trying to avoid that subject, and put it in the most diplomatic way possible!

[th'engineer]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Have you ever thought that some people want to get a job done quicker and are not interested in doing more jobs. How many times do you click on a link in a post and then have to wait two or three minutes for whatever to download.

Only when the NTL proxy routing is up the creak

[th'engineer]

Originally Posted by Ignition

Blimey I wander off for a while and it all goes pearshaped.

Th'Eng, nice glib remark, I'm aware we're in the UK,

Thats good thought you was comparing lemons with apples lets only look at the UK please